Here comes “The Sun.”
The Washington Sun, that is — the new name for the news website NOTUS after a trademark lawsuit several months ago stymied the outlet’s plan to rebrand as The Star.
The name, said the editor in chief, Tim Grieve, is intended to reflect the outlet’s expansion into local news and sports coverage in the wake of The Washington Post’s staff cuts at the beginning of the year. It will take effect Wednesday.
“We really wanted Washington in the name of our publication to more clearly convey that we cover Washington, both sort of political Washington and local Washington,” Mr. Grieve said.
NOTUS, which stands for News of the United States, was started in 2023 by the media entrepreneur Robert Allbritton, a co-founder of Politico. A nonprofit newsroom, it initially focused on coverage of government and policy. But as The Post pulled back from metro news, Mr. Allbritton saw room to fill that void.
Along with the rebrand, The Washington Sun will introduce a paywall to its website this month. Subscriptions will cost $9.99 a month; Mr. Grieve said its newsletters would remain free.
At the beginning of the year, the NOTUS newsroom consisted of 45 people. The number, Mr. Grieve said, has now more than doubled, to 110. Many new hires are former members of The Post’s staff, including the food critic Tom Sietsema, the columnist Dana Milbank and a slew of sports reporters.
Mr. Grieve said the newsroom now had a large team reporting on local news and local sports in the Washington area.
“I think people are really hungry particularly for the local and sports coverage that has faded away with what’s happened at The Post and with local newspapers around the country,” he said.
Mr. Grieve said The Washington Sun had also entered into an exclusive content licensing agreement with Capital Weather, the forecasting website that was affiliated with The Post for the past 18 years as Capital Weather Gang, and would start running a daily weather forecast for the Washington area.
It’s NOTUS’s second attempt at a rebrand this year. In May, a month after NOTUS said it would rename itself The Star, Dovid Efune, a media executive, announced that he was reviving The Washington Star, a newspaper that had shut down in 1981. Mr. Efune promptly filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against NOTUS.
A federal judge then ordered NOTUS to suspend its planned rebrand to “prevent the public from being confused” between the two publications while the lawsuit continued. In court documents, NOTUS said it would lose at least $2.5 million from canceling a planned relaunch event, prepaid advertising and sponsorship revenue.
On June 18, the parties agreed to resolve the case, paying their own costs and legal fees, and NOTUS said it would drop its plan to use the Star moniker.
Mr. Grieve said that The Washington Sun had always been on a shortlist of names for the outlet, and that the publication had waited to announce the new name so it could also launch a newly designed website.
The post Politics News Site NOTUS Rebrands as The Washington Sun appeared first on New York Times.
